RE: Prod. [39] VC: Element Valid

My intention was not to advocate that the element type ANY should be 
removed, but that prod. [39] VC: "Element Valid" contains a detail which is 
unnecessary, namely what is expressed by the words "whose types have been 
declared".  In other words, point 4 should in my opinion read:

"The declaration matches ANY, and the content (after replacing any entity 
reference with their replacement text) consists of character data, CDATA 
sections, comments, PIs and child elements."

The last clause ("whose types have been declared") should be removed, 
because the condition that the type of each child element has been declared 
is already covered by the first sentence of VC: Element Valid ("An element 
is valid if there is a declaration matching ...") when the child nodes are 
themselves tested for validity.  So there exists no reason  to test whether 
the child nodes have been declared when validating the  parent node.  A 
parser must do this when it assesses the child nodes itself. The removal of 
the clause "whose types have been declared" is also supported by the fact 
that no equivalent clause exists for the child nodes of an element which 
has been declared to have element content (point 2) or mixed content (point 3).

I am aware of the fact that my proposed modification is not substantial, 
i.e. it does not change the conditions under which a document is rated 
valid (because document validation must assess all elements).  I am just 
applying Ockham's razor on the wording of the VC and thus advocating to 
condense a VC of the general form (stripping all details not necessary for 
the argument) "For each element X, X must meet condition A and its child 
elements must also meet condition A" into "For each element X, X must meet 
condition A" (where "A" is the condition that the type of the element has 
been declared).

Dieter Köhler


At 09:31 22.07.05 +0800, Xu Han-a21787 wrote:
>Tim Bray has a comment on this issue in Annotated XML.
>
>Please refer to http://www.xml.com/axml/notes/Any1.html for detail.
>
>Han
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: xml-editor-request@w3.org [mailto:xml-editor-request@w3.org] On 
>Behalf Of d.k@philo.de
>Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 9:33 PM
>To: xml-editor@w3.org
>Subject: Prod. [39] VC: Element Valid
>
>
>In prod. [39] VC: Element Valid, paragraph 4, the condition that the types 
>of the child elements of an element of type ANY must have been declared 
>seems to be superfluous, because this condition is also verified when each 
>child element itself is tested for VC: Element Valid.  Also note that the 
>other three paragraphs do no contain an equivalent condition.
>
>Dieter Köhler
>
>Institute of Philosophy and
>Centre for Multimedia Studies
>University of Karlsruhe
>Germany

Received on Saturday, 23 July 2005 01:06:04 UTC